


Dressing for Dinner

by LyraNgalia



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Character Study, Deductions, Dinner, F/M, Gen, Introspection, Post-Hiatus, References to The Irene Adler series, References to the Nero Wolfe Mysteries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-31 02:33:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6452038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LyraNgalia/pseuds/LyraNgalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dinner, for most people, is a straightforward affair. Fortunately, Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes are not "most people". For the Consulting Detective and The Woman, an invitation to dinner is about far more than a meal, and the preparation far more involved...</p><p>A character study on what "let's have dinner" <i>really</i> involves when Irene Adler is the one making the invitation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dressing for Dinner

**Author's Note:**

> For those readers itching for the beginning of the last installment of _[Death Takes A Holiday](http://archiveofourown.org/series/42382)_ , I hope this little nibble will satisfy your cravings until April 16th. For everyone else, _bon appétit_.

She is in Dubai when it hits.

It comes upon her as it always does, first a gossamer dissatisfaction with a perfectly planned and executed crime. A few days later, it is a niggling irritation at Moran's obedience, a restless itch at the base of her skull. Her temper is sharper then, her tolerance for both incompetence and loyalty fraying. She is _bored_ and her network shudders at the blows.

She is still in Dubai, reading the papers and mentally earmarking which politicians will end the day paupers and which criminals enriched. By the end of the day, there is one politician who will be sacrificed for what he believes is a noble cause but is a fool's errand. But it is only when she discards her fourth paper (along with three perfectly good plans for the theft of art work from the new Louvre in Abu Dhabi and one scheme for the ruin of a particularly odious American politician) and reaches for her fifth does Irene Adler realize what the irritation is, the grit in the lens, the particulate in her machinery.

She calms then, and her eyes narrow as she informs Moran she needs a new mobile. A burner. Moran grumbles about having to to buy one from the seller down the street from the hotel, but Irene is adamant. No, she is going to Lichtenstein. He stares at her for a moment, waiting for a twitch, a smirk, anything that gives away she's merely testing him, but she gives nothing away and Moran sighs, and begins to pack his arsenal. He is her enforcer, her second-in-command in the bloodier portions of her enterprise. He is not her handler, her companion. He leaves sorting out her whims to the woman known as Sibyl Vane, whom Irene calls Nell.

Nell, on the other hand, has expected this since the second day of Irene's seemingly inexplicable pique. She has already readied the bags, and it only takes Irene announcing her destination for Nell to acquire plane tickets. Two adults to Lichtenstein, one adult and one child to Montenegro. Nell knows, even as Irene goes quiet, her intensity turned inward, her eyes bright with some unfolding plan, how the next few weeks will fall out.

Nell and the boy who refuses to answer to anything but Nero board a plane to Montenegro, to a well-kept, comfortable old house overlooking Kotor Bay. Irene heads for Lichtenstein, and Moran follows dutifully. He knows that if anything happens to Irene, Nell will have his head, and she is only second to Irene on the list of people Moran would not cross without a gun to his temple.

Irene arrives in Vaduz, Lichtenstein and spends three days in the city. Moran grumbles to himself that it is not until the second day that she buys the burner mobile she'd insisted upon having, but Irene ignores him. He wonders if she is deliberately ignoring him or if she had simply forgotten his presence. He wonders, but he does not test the theory. He still bears the scar of the last time he'd tested a theory about his employer.

The third day she is in Vaduz, Irene calls Moran into her hotel sitting room and lays out a plan. The plan is elaborate, but Moran's part in it is simple. To shadow a rising politician in Austria, one whose sudden prominence had caught Irene's attention. It is the sort of task he excels at, watching a target from afar, shadowing his prey's movements until he'd gathered enough intelligence about the mark's movements to satisfy whatever hunger Irene had for the man's influences, his political partners. Sometimes after he'd gathered the data, he cleaned up after himself. Other times he did not. He would not know which this would be until he was finished.

Irene sends him off, and Moran leaves for Austria, to trace the movements of a politician and his suspected criminal ties that were not hers. She is left alone in Vaduz, and it is after half a day alone that Irene leaves. She leaves and heads to Bangkok, where she buys a silk scarf within the airport but never leaves the terminal, then flies again, this time to Manhattan. Once in Manhattan, she acquires a hotel penthouse, and spends three more days plotting, whispering instructions along her web to faceless hands in Germany, in Paris, in London.

 

A man dies in Surrey behind a locked door. His husband is suspected of the murder. Scotland Yard is perplexed.

 

Irene Adler sits in her hotel room in Manhattan, the scarf from Bangkok a gossamer whisper against her bare skin, and sets the mobile from Lichtenstein on the table in front of her. She turns it on, lets it acquire a signal that will give away its provenience, but does not flip it open, does not tap in the memorized number. Instead, Irene rises from her seat, strides across the room, her pale limbs draped in the Thai silk, and reaches for her favourite lipstick.

She stands in front of the mirror, its light tastefully mimicking natural sunlight, and carefully lines her lips in carmine, the colour thick as blood. The tile floor is cool beneath her feet as she sets the lipstick down, blots it carefully, and pulls up her hair, arranging it in the elaborate coif that speaks so casually of power and control. She smiles at the Woman who stares back at her from the mirror, her eyes pale beneath dark lashes and the glint of bright teal, her lips curved like a scythe, her teeth white, showing in a hungry smile.

Because it is what has come upon her again, had settled over her like a cloak in Dubai, the now-familiar hunger, the need for something, for something _more_ than the simple challenges of a criminal empire. The hunger for a challenge, the drive for something more interesting than the same old stories of the same old politicians and the same old crimes. A hunger for a like mind, for a game whose outcome is uncertain rather than one that is sure. It is unpredictable when the hunger will strike, but she knows it does, that it is something she will never shake. A thirst, an addiction to the challenge...

And there is only one way to satiate herself.

Irene shifts, drapes the Bangkok scarf more securely over her body, letting her perfume linger in the silk, the touch of her hands mark it, the stray strands of her hair tangle in it, and she steps into a pair of Louboutin stilettos, their heels scuffed with wear, She catches the trailing edge of the scarf under one heel, leaves a telltale trace of Manhattan dirt on the corner. She is focused now, precise, savouring each second, each clue that she weaves as she dons her armour. Her fingernails had been painted recently, by a lisping Vietnamese woman in Brooklyn with an expensive coffee habit, and the red lacquered surface slides cleanly over the desk as she returns to the sitting room, picks up the mobile from Lichtenstein.

Irene Adler pauses as she flips open the mobile, takes a deep, anticipatory breath, as if preparing herself for a sumptuous meal. She licks her lips, tasting the wax of the freshly applied lipstick, and muses over the trail of clues she's left behind. Nell and her son ensconced in their retreat in Montenegro, Moran sent away on an errand. The body in Surrey that would no doubt make itself known to Scotland Yard and a certain consulting detective in London. Yes, Sherlock Holmes _would_ notice the case, the body in a locked room, the too-obvious husband with a motive and a means but no murder weapon.

She taps the memorized number into her mobile, and lets out her held breath. She does not call, because calling would be too easy. No, a text is more their speed. An anonymous text, a number that is clearly, obviously European. She expects he will track the number to Lichtenstein, to airplanes that landed in the small country today. Her smile deepens, and her pupils dilate as she tracks the pieces, as she lets her mind sink into the familiar game, the familiar patterns of the way _He_ thinks. This is, after all, the preamble to their game. The appetizer before the main course. To see if she can predict his moves, and in the same moment deflect them.

Yes, she expects he will look to Lichtenstein first, before he realizes it is too obvious. Would it take an hour? Two? The latter would flatter her ego. The former is closer to what she expects from him. The signal then, would be obvious. Manhattan. New York City was an ideal place to hide, an excellent place to muddy the waters, to confuse anyone trying to track down a single flight.

But she'll leave him a clue, of course, a photograph, perhaps, a shot of the view outside her hotel room with a strategically bared ankle draped in Thai silk. Yes, she thinks, that would be an excellent diversion, to see whether he would focus on the view of Manhattan first, try for the hotel room, or would he consider it too obvious, and attempt to identify the make of the silk scarf.

Irene chuckles to herself, low and languid, as she takes a seat again, stretches, frames said silk and ankle in frame, and snaps a photograph. She sends it first, to the number she has memorized. The itch that had settled at the base of her skull in Dubai has ebbed, at least for the moment, replaced with a familiar anticipation in the pit of her stomach, the familiar hunger for a challenge, for a game, for an intellectual equal.

She sends a text fifty-two seconds after the photograph (the exact number of the floor of her hotel room). Just three familiar words.

 

 _Let's have dinner_.

 

She tosses the mobile carelessly back onto the table, its purpose complete. She will get no response. It is part of the rules of engagement. To respond would be to give up. To admit to not being able to solve the mystery. Irene leans back in her seat and stretches, catlike, as she imagines the text appearing on Sherlock Holmes' mobile phone, the unknown number.

His fingers will move for the mobile, instinctively reaching for it. She imagines his eyes will widen at the unknown number, then his lips will twist at the messages. His brow will furrow as he realizes what he has, as he immediately begins to categorize what clues have been sent, what clues are deliberate distractions and which are true. She imagines his left thumb will twitch, an utterly unconscious gesture, reaching for a phantom band of gold on the fourth finger of his left hand.

At that particular thought, Irene rises from her seat, leaving the scarf from Bangkok behind like a shed snake's skin, her scent and her perfume clinging to the fibers, and crosses the room to the small bag she's brought with her. From a hidden interior pocket, she unearths a ring of antique gold, a large amethyst set in its center surrounded by diamonds, and slips it onto her hand, the weight settling, heavy and familiar, onto the fourth finger.

A small wry smile twists her blood red lips as she sees the gleaming gold ring on her finger, as she scoffs at herself. How utterly idiotic, putting on jewelry along with the dominatrix's armour as if she were dressing for dinner.

But then... dinner for them was not a simple affair, was not merely a meal to satiate physical hunger. For _them_ , the three words were weighty with history and promise, something more than a mere invitation, but a challenge. A call to a like mind, the only one in the world, a promise of crossing paths, of crossing brains, of satiating a need for connection, of satiating intellectual and physical hungers that no one else could.

 _Let's have dinner_ was no more simply an invitation to a meal than Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes were simply ordinary people. It was more complex than a drink at a hotel bar, more interesting than molecular gastronomy or a show at the theatre. It was crime and passion and a holiday from their cold dispassionate selves. A stolen moment of vulnerability and the threat of losing for two individuals who always won.

Irene considers the time again. It would be an eight hour flight from London to New York. Assuming he solved her puzzle within two hours, and another two to disappear from London without rousing Mycroft Holmes' suspicions... She will have about twelve hours to perfect her disguise, to litter New York City with false clues to tempt and confound one Sherlock Holmes. Not a tremendous amount of time to outwit the world's only consulting detective, but then she would not be the Woman if she needed a tremendous amount of time.

Irene's smile grows like a sharp twist of razor wire as she considers what trails to throw out, how to best disguise herself well enough to fool Sherlock Holmes while still able to get close enough to watch him squirm. Her smile grows, and she begins to layer her disguise, to taste accents on her tongue and layer sharp vowels atop soft lazy consonants until the voice tripping over her tongue tastes of intrigue.

 

She begins to dress for dinner in earnest.

 


End file.
